132: I Answer Your Questions

In this episode, I open up a Q&A session where I answer questions from my Instagram followers covering various topics, from personal fitness and Ironman prep to family experiences and my evolving relationship with faith. Highlights include an update on my Ironman training, reflections on my first concert memories with my daughter, and the significance of faith in my journey. I also dive into my nutritional strategies, the importance of not comparing oneself to others, and some personal insights into my daily routines and business principles. CHAPTERS: 00:40 Ironman Prep Update 01:56 Charlie's First Concert Experience 04:55 Faith and Its Role in My Life 18:22 Fitness Data Monitoring 26:42 Misconceptions About Me 31:35 Alcohol Consumption and Lifestyle 37:51 Building a Business Brand 43:46 Staying Injury-Free During Training 46:08 Building Volume and Intensity for Ironman 47:41 The Importance of Recovery and Off-Season 51:33 Creatine: Benefits and Misconceptions 59:14 A Day in the Life: Balancing Work and Family 01:04:18 Pickled Beets and Sludge Bowls: Nutrition Habits 01:09:58 Fueling for Performance vs. Aesthetics 01:16:05 Staying Motivated Without Comparison 01:21:26 Future of Endurance Races at Bear Ranch 01:26:20 Launching G1M Sport RTD Beverages 01:29:45 Defining Success and Winning ORDER MY BOOK HERE: https://www.amazon.com/Go-One-More-Intentional-Life-Changing/dp/1637746210 FOLLOW: Become a BPN member FOR FREE - Unlock 20% off FOR LIFE https://bpn.team/member IG: instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: youtube.com/@nickbarefitness

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Nick Bare?

  Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today's episode is a question and answer that I opened up on my Instagram last week. And there were a bunch of good questions that came in, but I have a handful that I've somewhat consolidated based off of general questions and similarities. Some fun stuff, some fitness stuff, some family stuff, some personal stuff, some business stuff, covering a bunch of different topics. But a few things prior to getting into this that I want to share.

• 0:46Nick Bare?

  First off, we just kicked off as of today, week four of Ironman prep. So we've been putting out one episode on YouTube. That is a plan. Every Monday, 9:00 AM Central Standard Time, we will be releasing a new episode of the Ironman Prep Series, leading into Ironman Arizona, November 16th. So today kicks off week four of training. I've slowly been ramping up volume. This week I will move into 19 hours of total training for the week, split across running, cycling and swimming, and some strength work. But we're slowly increasing volume.

• 1:31Nick Bare?

  I should get my volume up to about 22 hours of training per week. Tomorrow I have one of my biggest, I do have my biggest cycling ride to date in this prep. The three and a half hour session on the bike, on the indoor trainer, which should be fun. My butt cheeks should be feeling that one for sure after that workout is done. And then something else I wanted to share. So we took Charlie, our three-year-old daughter, to her first concert this past weekend. It was a Brandon Lake and Phil Wickham concert, and it was an incredible experience.

• 2:16Nick Bare?

  Me and Steph were talking, you know, your first concert is one of those things that... I feel like you remember forever and it gets brought up and asked at all these different intersections and points of your life.

• 2:34Nick Bare?

  Throughout your life, like my first concert, for example, was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Hanson. Hanson was this boy band, these three brothers, I believe it was three brothers. And you know, their hit song called Um Bop. If you are a nineties kid, I was born in 1990. I actually turned thirty-five in a few days. My birthday is coming up. Thirty-five years old, which is crazy to think. But I was a nineties baby, born in 1990. Hanson was a huge, huge band growing up. That was my first concert. Charlie can say her first concert was Brandon Lake, Phil Wickham. And it was one of the most incredible.

• 3:21Nick Bare?

  I want to say concerts, but it was so much more than a concert. It was one of the most incredible shows that I have and we have ever been to. It was a combination of music and worship and scripture and preaching and stories and connection and it was extremely powerful. And it was such a good experience. So I would encourage you, if you have Brandon Lake and Phil Wickham coming to a city near you and there's a show that you can go to, go do it. Go do it. It was incredible. The entire experience was incredible. We actually got

• 4:02Nick Bare?

  to meet Brandon Lake. Charlie got to meet Brandon Lake. She was really intimidated. She was extremely shy, but she keeps talking about it. And ever since the concert, she's been asking when we're in the car for either Brandon Lake or Phil Wickham music. And they did some, some duos together. So now when she asks for their music, she wants to hear them together because she saw them perform together at the, the show at the concert. So I'm now trying to figure that out and navigate that. So we'll either play her Brandon Lake or Phil Wickham when she asks, but that was his past weekend. It was a really good weekend, spending time with the family. Had a long run for, for my prep, 16 miles.

• 4:48Nick Bare?

  It was the longest run of this prep so far. And it felt, it felt really good, felt really solid. So that's what I wanted to share before we dove into and dive into some of these question and answer topics. And the first question,

• 5:04Nick Bare?

  it, it, it comes off of what I was just talking about being at the concert. Brandon Lake, Phil Wickham, worship, faith. And the question is, what significance has faith played into your success?

• 5:23Nick Bare?

  And I think this question came up because as of recently, I have been sharing more about my, my faith, my faith journey, the relationship that I have and am building with God, how faith is built into our family and our business. I've been sharing more scripture

• 5:52Nick Bare?

  on social media and, and just the things that we have as a family been practicing in private or at church and worship. I have been,

• 6:06Nick Bare?

  I've been feeling the, the responsibility and the obligation to be more public facing with my faith and sharing.

• 6:18Nick Bare?

  And it's something I haven't done in the past and I can't.

• 6:22Nick Bare?

  Necessarily tell you why, but it's something that I've been doing recently and I feel called to and I feel very, very strongly about. And the response from a lot of people has been extremely positive and strong. But the question is, what significance has faith played into your success?

• 6:46Nick Bare?

  You know, I grew up in a small town called Palmyra, Pennsylvania, right outside of Hershey, Pennsylvania, central PA. And I always find it interesting that Pennsylvania is the only state, I think it's the only state, where people refer to it as the abbreviation or acronym PA. If you meet someone from Pennsylvania, they tell you they're from PA. If you're from Texas, you don't say you're from TX. If you're from Tennessee, you don't say you're from TN.

• 7:19Nick Bare?

  But Pennsylvanians, PA, PA, if you're from PA, you know.

• 7:26Nick Bare?

  And growing up in Pennsylvania, our family went to church almost every Sunday.

• 7:34Nick Bare?

  If we didn't have sports, you know, growing up, me and my brother played a lot of travel sports. And when we were traveling for sporting events or tournaments, we didn't go to church those Sundays, but we grew up going to church.

• 7:48Nick Bare?

  And growing up going to church, it was a religion. It was a, a practice. It was an act that we did every Sunday. You wake up, you put on your church clothes, which was khakis and a polo or khakis and a button down. You threw some, some gel or pomade in your hair and pushed it over.

• 8:17Nick Bare?

  And that's really all it was for me growing up. It was something we did,

• 8:24Nick Bare?

  but it wasn't a relationship.

• 8:28Nick Bare?

  And when I went to college, I stopped going to church. And then when I graduated college and went into the army, I didn't go to church. Faith played a role in my life. It multiple different time periods and intersections. Like when I was in, in the army, when I was in Ranger School, every Sunday, we would have a chaplain come in. And we could sit and listen to this, this chaplain, preach and worship and, and tell us about God and the Bible.

• 9:13Nick Bare?

  But to be honest, most people went to church services with the chaplain during Ranger School for an hour, because you knew you weren't getting smoked by the Ranger instructors. And the chaplain would give us a piece of bread with peanut butter on it. So we would go pretty much just for the piece of bread and peanut butter.

• 9:33Nick Bare?

  But Ranger School was a very challenging point in my life. And I resonated with church services when I was in Ranger School because it was very low. It was hard. It was challenging. It was fearful. And

• 9:52Nick Bare?

  the, the words and the scripture and the stories that the chaplain shared then just connected to a lot of us that were there in that school at that time. We needed God. We wanted God.

• 10:07Nick Bare?

  And then when I got out of the military and was all into building BPN,

• 10:15Nick Bare?

  I didn't try to find a church. I didn't, I didn't really prioritize my relationship with God or faith. And up until that point, I still didn't know that faith was about having a relationship with God. I felt that faith was.

• 10:36Nick Bare?

  Christianity as in a religion. Just because that's

• 10:43Nick Bare?

  kind of what I viewed it as and thought it was growing up when I was younger.

• 10:48Nick Bare?

  And then as

• 10:51Nick Bare?

  as my mom passed away in 2019 from ovarian cancer.

• 10:56Nick Bare?

  That truly was the spark for not only me, but Steph and I. Steph was my fiance then, and we got married shortly after my mom passed away. But when my mom was on hospice in her last couple of days at home before she passed away.

• 11:16Nick Bare?

  She looked at all of us being the kids, my dad, our family, and she said, if you ever want to see me again, you have to follow the Lord.

• 11:30Nick Bare?

  And that sparked something in both Steph and I. And we took that as a direct call to action

• 11:38Nick Bare?

  to start practicing our faith, start building a relationship with God.

• 11:46Nick Bare?

  Following the Lord.

• 11:50Nick Bare?

  Because my mom told me to. And because we felt called to.

• 11:55Nick Bare?

  And it was, it was these, these small micro decisions in baby steps from that point until today.

• 12:04Nick Bare?

  Now, that was 2019. That was, that was June of 2019. It is now July of 2025. So that was six years ago.

• 12:16Nick Bare?

  It's crazy to think that my mom passed away six years ago. Six years goes really fast, really fast.

• 12:25Nick Bare?

  But over those last six years, Steph and I have made it a, a priority to start going to church. We go to a local church here in Georgetown, Texas called Celebration.

• 12:38Nick Bare?

  And there wasn't this moment where it was, we're going all in.

• 12:46Nick Bare?

  I kind of wish we would have done that, but it was these small micro decisions in baby steps from June of 2019 until today, where our, our faith has become stronger. Our understanding of what a relationship with God looks like has become more meaningful.

• 13:07Nick Bare?

  And it is now a very strong, important and prioritized part of our family unit. Our faith in our relationship with God. And it's really important that we share that with our kids. And even me, as a, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner,

• 13:33Nick Bare?

  as a content creator, I've had a lot of thoughts around this the, the last couple of months. And I believe that God has gifted me with these platforms, this community and audience to do much greater things than share fitness information and document my life.

• 13:58Nick Bare?

  I think I have been blessed with these platforms to do something larger and greater and, and ultimately more meaningful. And that's why I've been called and feel like I, I need to share this journey that I've gone through over these last couple of years of building this relationship with God and, and the importance of faith in our family, our relationship and our life.

• 14:28Nick Bare?

  And I have a few pieces of scripture that I want to share

• 14:32Nick Bare?

  to kind of wrap up this question and my answer to this question.

• 14:38Nick Bare?

  But before I do, um, the thing that I want to say is, I have always, I believe, made it a priority to make decisions, build a life and lead people in a way that I would, in my family, would be proud of.

• 14:59Nick Bare?

  Through character and core values and being a role model.

• 15:07Nick Bare?

  A few years ago,

• 15:11Nick Bare?

  I knew that was a priority.

• 15:14Nick Bare?

  And now, those things are just as much a priority, but I'm realizing that I've learned that it is those exact same things through the words and works of God in the Bible, in the Scripture.

• 15:35Nick Bare?

  So from Galatians,

• 15:39Nick Bare?

  it says, "Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ." And I share that piece of Scripture

• 15:57Nick Bare?

  to say that in all things that we do,

• 16:02Nick Bare?

  the things that we are working to accomplish, the success as this question directed, it is not to please other people or to gain the praise and approval of anyone else other than God. So that piece of Scripture there directs my actions, my work, and how I define success.

• 16:26Nick Bare?

  And the next piece of Scripture I want to share is from Luke. It says, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me; for whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world and yet lose or forfeit their very self? Whoever is ashamed of me in my words, the Son of God will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the Holy Angels."

• 17:01Nick Bare?

  And I share that piece of Scripture, which is also guided, how I define success,

• 17:09Nick Bare?

  to share that what I've learned is having a relationship with God and having faith is not for me.

• 17:19Nick Bare?

  It's not to save me.

• 17:25Nick Bare?

  But whoever loses their life for me will save it.

• 17:31Nick Bare?

  Having a faith and a foundation of faith, and this is what I want to

• 17:36Nick Bare?

  instill as I lead my family and teach my children, is that having a faith in relationship with God is not to save you and get you to heaven. It is because it is what God wants us to do and share those words and be a contributing member of society and living through God as we are supposed to. It's not to save us.

• 18:01Nick Bare?

  It's what we are being called to, is our obligation, it is our responsibility.

• 18:07Nick Bare?

  So I hope that answers what significant faith has played into, not necessarily my success, but my journey over these years. All right, hard pivot into some fitness stuff. Number two, what data do I monitor daily?

• 18:28Nick Bare?

  I really wanted to answer this and we're going to create a whole YouTube video on this topic for an Ironman prep series. Because I'm a firm believer that too much data can become dangerous. There are some people out there, potentially the biohackers of the world who are obsessed with data and to each their own. I mean, there's definitely a time and place for data and lots of data. There are a few things that I monitor and measure, but I personally don't get obsessed with tons of data. Because what I have found is when I have too much data, it sometimes makes it hard to make a decision that is guided without data.

• 19:13Nick Bare?

  You know, if I wake up one morning, and I don't wear a whoop personally, but I used to wear a whoop. And when I would wear a whoop, a whoop strap, I would wake up some mornings and it would say, "You are in the red, don't train."

• 19:33Nick Bare?

  And I think to myself, well, I feel decent. I feel like I can, I can train. But this watch is telling me, or this device is telling me not to.

• 19:44Nick Bare?

  So I started listening to my body more intuitively, subjectively, as opposed to just relying on objective data all the time. I think too much data, this is a personal opinion. Uh, I think too much data can be dangerous and it can be all consuming. So here's some of the data that I monitor daily. Heart rate. I monitor heart rate around training, uh, during workouts, and even more specifically during recovery sets. So here's an example. When I am going out for my easy run, I will wear, uh, an external heart rate monitor. Either the Garmin strap across my chest or the Koro strap around my bicep.

• 20:30Nick Bare?

  And that will sync via Bluetooth to my watch and I can monitor heart rate in real time. Based off of pace and then considering, uh, climate, temperature, humidity, dew point, the conditions of the road, am I running on a flat? Am I running on hills? And I will monitor my heart rate around training to ensure that I am staying in the appropriate zone. But there's some also, uh, some really positive immediate feedback that that can provide you. But if I am running the same route every day and normally my heart rate is say 140 beats per minute on my easy runs. And one day after a big workout, I go on that same route,

• 21:15Nick Bare?

  same pace, similar weather conditions, and my heart rate is jacked up closer to 150. I know that my body is having a hard time with that effort because it's not recovered properly. Uh, and it's struggling to maintain. So I will use heart rate to determine zones of training and then my readiness and recovery.

• 21:42Nick Bare?

  Resting heart rate. So resting heart rate is a sign of building fitness. It can be, but it can also be a sign of overtraining, under recovering. So when I started this Ironman prep, my resting heart rate was 42 beats per minute. So that's when, when I'm at rest, my heart rate comes down to 42 beats per minute. We're about, you know, like I said, we're, we're in the week four of Ironman prep right now. My resting heart rate has now dropped to 39 beats per minute. That means I am building fitness. I am getting fitter.

• 22:26Nick Bare?

  If I were to see my resting heart rate go the opposite direction, that might mean that I'm getting sick. That might mean that I'm overtraining or that I'm under recovering. So I will use resting heart rate as an objective data point to show and determine if I'm building fitness and if I'm also recovering properly or if I'm about to get sick. Heart rate variability. Now, this is what the WHOOP strap measures, HRV. You've probably heard, or many people have heard of HRV. It's become a very popular data point to monitor in terms of fitness, performance, health, recovery. It is simply a measure of the variation in time between

• 23:10Nick Bare?

  each heartbeat. So this variation is controlled by a primitive part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system. It works behind the scenes, automatically regulating our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and digestion. So I will just closely monitor HRV.

• 23:35Nick Bare?

  Heart rate variability and I want to see that it is maintaining, it's not dropping significantly. If it's increasing, great, it means I'm recovering more efficiently. But if I see my HRV dropping too much, too quickly, that's a sign that I'm not recovering appropriately. I will monitor sleep, time in bed, REM sleep, deep sleep. I'll measure and monitor TSS. Now, TSS is a, it stands for Training Stress Score. And it's specifically assigned within the Training Peaks app. Now, I use Training Peaks to input all my workouts for this Ironman prep.

• 24:19Nick Bare?

  And then it'll provide some pretty interesting data based off the workouts you do. That's pulling from my Garmin or Strava, my Zwift, all these different platforms and softwares that I'm using around my fitness. I use Training Peaks as kind of my source of truth for all data that comes in. And Training Peaks will provide you a TSS score, like I said, Training Stress Score.

• 24:47Nick Bare?

  And this quantifies the stress of a workout, taking into account both intensity and duration. It's a metric that helps athletes and coaches understand the impact of training sessions on the body and aids in planning workouts and rest periods. TSS allows for comparison between different types of workouts, such as a long, low-intensity ride and a short, high-intensity interval session. So I like to monitor my TSS score. That just quantifies, like I said, the stress of a workout and the stress of my training in a week. And I'll also monitor volume, volume of training. This can either be mileage or hours.

• 25:34Nick Bare?

  That's really the data that I monitor on a regular basis. I guess if we added one more on there, it might be caloric intake and caloric expenditure, which I'll talk about a little bit later in this episode. But I don't get crazy with data. Those are kind of the metrics and data points that I look at.

• 25:57Nick Bare?

  Regularly. And I do wanna make a call out and a point. I use data to look for trends, spikes, or callouts. But I don't lose sleep over it. Like I said, data can be a super useful tool, but it can also be very dangerous to the individual, becoming all consumed by data. But I'm looking for trends, not necessarily changes day to day, but changes over a week or week to week throughout a prep and a build. Question three.

• 26:28Nick Bare?

  What is a misconception people have about you? So I asked Steph to help me answer this one.

• 26:38Nick Bare?

  It just felt right to get some feedback from someone else, especially someone so close to my,

• 26:44Nick Bare?

  myself and my life, like my wife, Steph. So I asked her, what is a misconception that people have about me?

• 26:52Nick Bare?

  And she said that most people think that I train all day, all the time, every day, and I've been doing this for years.

• 27:03Nick Bare?

  And this may be the case when I'm in a certain prep and we're filming a certain series. Like right now, within this Ironman prep and this YouTube series that we're, we're creating, I'm training a lot and we're filming and creating a lot.

• 27:24Nick Bare?

  From now until Ironman Arizona, November 16th, that is my primary objective and goal and focus within the business.

• 27:34Nick Bare?

  It's creating content around this prep series. So during the day, I am training a lot. That is a reality of it. And we're filming a lot. Uh, but I make sure that it does not affect my home and our family life. And Steph made sure that I shared that because she recognizes that. I make sure that I'm with the family in the morning and I'm with my family at night and I'm definitely with my family on the weekends, the entire weekend.

• 28:06Nick Bare?

  When I'm not in a big prep series like an Ironman prep and we're documenting the entire the build leading up to a race or competition. I train once, maybe twice a day. And that's either a run in the morning, you know, between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. Or it's a strength training session in the morning, or it's a strength training session for 45 minutes after work. But I'm not training excessively when I'm not in a huge prep or a build. You know, so I've met people who think that I train for three, four, five, six hours a day, and I've been doing this every day for the last 10 years.

• 28:51Nick Bare?

  And that's just definitely not the case. If I would have been doing that, I wouldn't have been able to build the business to this size and caliber that it is. And I don't think I would have been a great husband or father. And that is a huge priority of mine. A second misconception that Steph pointed out that she believes a lot of people have around me is that people assume that I am extremely tight and rigid and have a hard time letting loose. But it's actually quite the opposite. Again, depending on the season of life and my goals.

• 29:35Nick Bare?

  Right now, in this Ironman prep, I am pretty rigid and tight and I'm not extremely flexible. I'm not very loose with my diet.

• 29:49Nick Bare?

  But in a, in a normal time of my life, when I'm not in a big prep and we're not filming a huge series, which is, it's part of my job. I am very flexible, very loose in terms of diet and being off my routine and structure. And that has taken me, you know, time over the years to to learn the value and importance of, I love routine, I love structure. It's a big part of my life. It's allowed me to accomplish certain things and and reach specific milestones and and

• 30:33Nick Bare?

  build BPN into what it is today.

• 30:38Nick Bare?

  But not at the expense of forgetting to live and fostering relationships and embracing experiences. I think that's extremely important to point out. You can still experience life and enjoy good food and skip your routine every once in a while to make sure that you live and still get a lot of things, most things, done and accomplished.

• 31:11Nick Bare?

  And that kind of moves into the next question that I actually get quite often and I have for a long time. Do I consume alcohol? Do I drink?

• 31:24Nick Bare?

  Now, again, I have to preface this question saying, I'm in a big prep right now and I'm extremely focused and dialed in.

• 31:35Nick Bare?

  So from now until the race in November, I will have very few alcoholic beverages. I haven't had a glass of wine for a few weeks now. And it just doesn't fit into.

• 31:55Nick Bare?

  My life, my goals, my priorities at the moment. Now, I'm not saying that I'm not going to consume any alcohol until November 16th. You know, there will be maybe a date night that Steph and I have when we go downtown Austin for a dinner and I get a glass of wine or I get a margarita.

• 32:16Nick Bare?

  But when I'm in a prep, I'm extremely focused and dialed in.

• 32:21Nick Bare?

  Now, when I'm not in prep, I'm more flexible when it comes to consuming alcohol. But it's still by no means excessive. If I'm not in a prep,

• 32:37Nick Bare?

  I might have a few drinks a week. And when I say a few drinks a week, maybe two to three.

• 32:44Nick Bare?

  And if we go for a dinner with friends or it's Steph and I, I'm going to order either a glass of wine or a cocktail. I don't drink much beer ever.

• 32:57Nick Bare?

  And in 95% of the cases, it is just one drink. One alcoholic beverage with dinner.

• 33:06Nick Bare?

  And maybe sometimes at night, if Steph and I are making dinner with the family and it's a Sunday and you know, we're staying in, might crack open a bottle of wine and have a glass of wine, for example.

• 33:19Nick Bare?

  There is the occasion when I have two drinks in one sitting. But I can't tell you the last time I had two, more than two drinks. That is kind of my rule for myself. No more than two drinks. It might be two glasses of wine. It might be a cocktail and a glass of wine.

• 33:39Nick Bare?

  So I'm definitely not against drinking alcohol, consuming alcohol.

• 33:46Nick Bare?

  It fits into our lifestyle within moderation. And like I said, never more than two drinks in a, in a sitting. But when I'm extremely focused and I'm in a prep and I'm dialed in, it just doesn't fit into my life. You know, there's, there's very little positive that comes with it. It's going to create more negative consequences in terms of performance and recovery and, and poor sleep than the positive that could come from it. Now, if I'm at dinner, like I said, with my wife and we want to have a glass of wine together and, and enjoy each other's company, yeah, that, that is a positive for sure.

• 34:30Nick Bare?

  But that's kind of the way that I and, and we consume alcohol in our family. In our life, there are seasons where, like I said, I'm not in a prep and we're more flexible and loose and it's a glass of wine with, with dinner or with friends. But then there's times we go weeks and months without any alcohol. And to be honest, since becoming a father, my, uh, my perception of alcohol has changed for a few reasons. One, uh, I never want my kids to see me drunk.

• 35:12Nick Bare?

  And that's not something I enjoy doing. And I wouldn't expect or anticipate that they, they would witness that or, or be around that. It's not something that I enjoy doing, drinking in, in excess. It sounds horrible, to be honest. And if you have kids, you know that regardless of what time you go to sleep or the kids go to sleep, you wake up the next morning, you gotta be dad again. And you have to be there, you be ready, you have to perform, you have to be present. Uh, it's a responsibility, it's an obligation.

• 35:54Nick Bare?

  And there, there's no room to be hung over or, uh, not coherent around your kids. I never want to put myself in a position where I

• 36:09Nick Bare?

  Can't handle myself or my family and take care of them if I need to. And being under the influence is a negative consequence and it has extremely dangerous.

• 36:29Nick Bare?

  It's just a bad spot to be in. I would, I would never want to be under the influence when I have to take care of my family. It's a responsibility.

• 36:40Nick Bare?

  So my, my, my perception of alcohol has changed since becoming a father.

• 36:47Nick Bare?

  Again, there's nothing, there's nothing that I have against alcohol or consuming alcohol. When it is consumed in moderation and responsibly. There's a time and place, yes.

• 37:02Nick Bare?

  But there's, there's also a time and place not to.

• 37:06Nick Bare?

  So we consume it. This is a long way of saying we do consume it, but definitely not in excess and definitely consumed responsibly. Next question is, what is the best thing you did to establish your business branding early on?

• 37:26Nick Bare?

  So before diving into that one,

• 37:29Nick Bare?

  I wanna to make the point that I believe there's a difference between business and branding.

• 37:37Nick Bare?

  Branding is the look, the feel, the emotional response, the connection,

• 37:47Nick Bare?

  the mission around an organization.

• 37:52Nick Bare?

  The business part of an organization,

• 37:56Nick Bare?

  in my opinion, consists of sales and operations and processes and strategy and team culture and team building and management and, and directors, leadership.

• 38:17Nick Bare?

  Finance, legal, like that is the business side. There's the business side, there is the branding side. So if we're talking branding side in the context of this question, what's the best thing I did to establish my business branding early on? The answer is, I did not. I didn't do anything, to be honest. I more so went to market with a pretty bare bones approach to branding, because I just didn't know. Branding for me back then was get a logo, get a saying, get a website made, and then create some labels.

• 39:01Nick Bare?

  That's all that branding really was about in 2012, when I launched BPN out of my college apartment. Our, our brand has gotten to where it is today because of a natural evolution over time. We went to market, we learned, we refined. We tested, we learned, we refined. We tested, we learned, we refined. And now 13 years in, it's been 13 years of testing, learning, refining the brand to look a certain way, to feel a certain way, to create emotion and connection.

• 39:45Nick Bare?

  And that has been a natural evolution of just learning over these last 13 years. Was that the best way to do it? No. But it's the only way I knew how to do it. I didn't know what I was doing when I first got started. But this is what I would do if I were have to doing, if I would have to do it all over again. If I was creating a new business today to launch, say, a year from now, I would take a completely different approach. I'd be much more proactive, and I wouldn't rush to get a product or service into the market before I was ready. And there was alignment between my product and service,

• 40:27Nick Bare?

  the market, and the problem that I was trying to address and solve. So I would, if I was starting all over again right now, establish my vision. And that vision consists of core values, purpose, and goals.

• 40:44Nick Bare?

  If you're asking this question for yourself, go read BE Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 by Jim Collins. Read the whole book, but read chapter four eight times. It's all about vision. Then I would create a target market and I'd be as niche and specific with that target market. Who are we trying to serve? What problem are we attempting to solve and address? From there, I would create brand guidelines. This is logos. This is look and feel. This is colors. This is fonts. This is your brand bible. Everything that is built and created, whether that's logos, design, social, labels, website,

• 41:29Nick Bare?

  all of it is built off of a brand guideline. Then I would create a brand tone of voice. This is how you speak. It's what you say. It's what you don't say. And then I would invest in an in-house brand team. I won't outsource any of this to agencies. It would be all video, photo, and editors in-house. If you can't afford that, I would, I would start small. Get to the point where you can hire one person and then work until you can hire a second person and then work until you can hire a third person. That's what we did. We slowly built an in-house brand team of videographers, photographers, editors,

• 42:10Nick Bare?

  and it has been a game changer for our business. And then the last thing that I would encourage you to do is be a visionary. If you haven't read Traction by Gina Wickman, go read that. And then, once you read that, read the follow-up, which is Rocket Fuel. And it talks about the difference between a visionary and an integrator. You need a visionary in the business. A lot of the times, that is the founder. If not, it can be someone else within the business. Be the visionary. And if you are not the visionary, if you're not that person,

• 42:49Nick Bare?

  hire or find someone who can be that person. You need a visionary in the business. What do I do in order to stay injury-free or healthy with all the training that I do on a consistent basis?

• 43:08Nick Bare?

  Like I said in an earlier question, I'm not training at the level of volume and intensity year round like I am right now within this prep. But I always have a base level of fitness. I'm always running and lifting. And then when I go into a prep, the volume and intensity increases throughout a build for a specific goal. And after that goal was accomplished or that race or competition has ended, then I go back to baseline. This is a reason I say no to so many things, opportunities, or experiences in my life when I'm in a big prep.

• 43:49Nick Bare?

  Because it allows me to focus and stay injury free and healthy. Like right now in this, this Ironman prep. Because for me, when we go into these preps and the team, it's just as much a commitment of time to training as it is content production, pre-production, filming, post-production, and then publishing the content. So there's kind of two sides to it. So when we're in these really busy seasons, I say no to pretty much everything else. Not traveling at all, unless I absolutely have to.

• 44:29Nick Bare?

  I'm not doing any dinners out, whether it's personal or business. And the only exception is that I'll go do these dinners if my wife is involved. But like, I'm not just going to meet or connect with someone over a lunch or dinner. I say no to a lot of things right now so I can focus and stay healthy, stay on top of my nutrition, my hydration, my training, my recovery protocols, so that I don't put myself in a compromised position to get injured or be unhealthy. So what I do in order to stay injury free, healthy? Focus and say no to a lot of other things.

• 45:13Nick Bare?

  The second thing is to monitor and adjust volume and intensity appropriately. So the reason we call it a build is because we build into volume and intensity. So I started this prep, it was 18 weeks out from Ironman Arizona.

• 45:32Nick Bare?

  I started my volume in terms of running mileage, in terms of hours trained per week. At the lowest, it's going to be this entire prep and build. And then each additional week, I will slowly increase training volume. So mileage and time. And then we'll have some deloads. Like for example, it'll be four weeks of a build. And then we'll have a few days where I back off and I reduce training volume and intensity to deload and recover. And I'll be another four weeks of a build, then a few days of a deload of reduced volume and intensity and recover, and then four weeks of a build. So I'm monitoring volume and intensity.

• 46:18Nick Bare?

  And this is why I track it from week to week. So I can put it on a graph and show how we have these four week builds, it'll taper. Four week build, it'll taper. Four week build, it'll taper. And that's one of the ways you can stay injury free and healthy is by making sure you build into volume and intensity. You don't go from zero to 100 really quick and then hold 100 for all 18 weeks, hoping and praying that you stay injury free and healthy.

• 46:52Nick Bare?

  Nutrition, sleep, hydration, sauna, cold plunge, compression boots. These are all things that I utilize and prioritize in order to stay healthy and injury free. I train smart, I listen to my body. If I'm feeling a nagging injury start to creep up, I will address it. I will get it worked on with the PT that we use, Dr. Jordan from Helix. He comes in here into the office every Tuesday and works on the entire team.

• 47:24Nick Bare?

  And I like having seasons of training. I think this is, if I look at all the years that I've been pursuing these big efforts, whether it's an ultra or a triathlon or a marathon or bodybuilding competition or a high rocks.

• 47:40Nick Bare?

  I view

• 47:43Nick Bare?

  the year or years as in-season versus off-season, just like professional athletes do. When you're in-season, volume is high, intensity is high, there's a lot of specificity and structure to your training to facilitate a certain goal. But if you stayed in that in-season for an extended period of time, you're probably gonna put yourself in a position to get injured and hurt and be unhealthy. So I'm not someone who goes from race to race to race. I'm not a race junkie. Some people are. I see some people's race calendars for the year,

• 48:26Nick Bare?

  and it's like year after year after year where it's five, 10, 15 races in competition sometimes. And for me, that'd be way too much, way too much. And I see these people get injured all the time because they're not allowing themselves the time to recover and rest and bring training volume and intensity down to baseline for a period of time. It's just trying to maintain this threshold for extended periods of time, being weeks and months and years. And that puts you in a compromised position to get hurt and injured. So I believe that having an in-season and then an off-season is extremely beneficial.

• 49:09Nick Bare?

  Like, for example, I'm in-season right now towards a goal, that being Ironman Arizona. That's November 16th. Once that race is over, I will bring my training back to baseline.

• 49:25Nick Bare?

  I will pull, I mean, for the first couple of weeks after that race, I'll really pull back and just let my body reset and recover. And then from there, I'll slowly build training volume back up to baseline to ensure that any injuries or...

• 49:44Nick Bare?

  Things that are kind of nagging and bothering me, they have time to recover and heal before I jump back into another goal or another style of training. When I'm in my off-season, if you will, I'm prioritizing more strength than I am endurance. I believe that has allowed me to stay strong and healthy and injury-free and become more durable when I go into these big endurance training blocks, because they really do beat down the body. But that's just some of the ways that I have approached fitness and training and specifically goals to stay injury-free and healthy for, for the most part of these last couple of years.

• 50:26Nick Bare?

  Who, what, and why should someone use creatine?

• 50:33Nick Bare?

  What's really cool about creatine right now is it is as popular as it's ever been. It's been really cool to see the evolution of creatine supplementation and adoption over these last 10-plus years. When I first got into the supplement industry in 2012, creatine was viewed almost as it was a steroid. Like, if you were using creatine, you were using the real stuff. And people were afraid of creatine. And then, from 2012 until today,

• 51:13Nick Bare?

  being 2025, creatine is one of, if not the most studied supplement or ingredient, especially around sports performance and enhancement. And it has been shown time and time again to be effective, safe, and applicable for many different reasons and many different people. So, I believe that everyone should be using creatine, specifically creatine monohydrate. Now, I believe that we should say that you should and need to be at least 18-years-old to be consuming dietary supplements. So, as soon as you turn 18, I mean, I will

• 51:58Nick Bare?

  consume creatine monohydrate for my entire life, for many different reasons.

• 52:04Nick Bare?

  So I think everyone above 18 should and can be using creatine monohydrate. All of the old stigma, stereotype, and negative consequences and symptoms that people used to think that creatine created and induced. We found that just most of it isn't true. There is so much net benefit to creatine supplementation. Specifically creatine monohydrate. There's a bunch of different creatines types and sources of creatine on the market. A lot of people will try to market them as being superior or innovative.

• 52:48Nick Bare?

  And the reality is that creatine monohydrate is the best. It works. It's the most studied. We at BPN use Creapure. Now Creapure is the most safe, studied,

• 53:06Nick Bare?

  and pure form of creatine monohydrate on the market. It is specifically synthesized and produced in Germany by a company called Alzchem. We have a trademark license agreement with Creapure, so we can use Creapure. And that's exclusively where we source our creatine monohydrate from. So not only is our creatine monohydrate from Creapure exclusively from Creapure. It's also NSF certified for sport, so we get tested for banned and prohibited substances. And then within the NSF certification program, it tests all of our supplements to ensure that what we say is on the label is in the actual product.

• 53:50Nick Bare?

  So all of our products are extensively studied and our creatine monohydrate being Creapure is the best you can get. Now dosage and timing. Timing is kind of irrelevant. Creatine doesn't work in the same way that, say, caffeine would, where you consume caffeine and it has acute effects. You feel it within 20 to 30 minutes. You feel the heightened sense of awareness and energy and focus and concentration.

• 54:24Nick Bare?

  Creatine doesn't necessarily work in the same way. So it doesn't have acute action, which means that

• 54:33Nick Bare?

  Consumption and timing doesn't necessarily matter. You just want to take it once a day, every day, on training days and non-training days. Now, the typical dosage is five grams per day, and that's what I take right now. I take five grams of creatine monohydrate every single day. But there's actually a lot of significant studies out there showing that a higher dosage of creatine can be more beneficial, especially for cognitive health and performance. So after this Ironman, I actually might start experimenting with some higher dosages of creatine, just because I don't want to change anything within this prep right now.

• 55:16Nick Bare?

  10, 15, even 20 grams has been studied and shown effective in certain individuals. And the way that creatine works is that creatine is stored in the muscles as creatine phosphate. So when your body is utilizing energy, it is utilizing energy from a source called ATP. And when your body uses and breaks down this ATP, it breaks down the phosphate molecules of that ATP. When you're consuming creatine on a regular and consistent basis, your creatine phosphate

• 55:57Nick Bare?

  stores are saturated within the muscle and within the body. So that when your body is using energy, it breaks down its primary source being ATP. If you have readily available creatine phosphate in the body, that can then donate a phosphate molecule to regenerate ATP, creating and producing more energy, more strength, more power output, greater performance. Creatine works by regenerating ATP being energy.

• 56:33Nick Bare?

  But over these last couple of years, there's been some pretty profound studies showing an increase in cognitive health and performance. So creatine is very important for the brain to work well. And it's not just a substance used for muscle-related activities. Creatine acts as a storage of high-energy phosphate, like we've talked about, which helps maintain the brain's energy levels during activities that require a lot of energy. And the thing is that the brain uses about 20% of the body's energy. So the research and the findings around creatine supplementation are becoming better and better and better.

• 57:15Nick Bare?

  And it's not only safe and effective, but it also has much more significant benefit than just hypertrophy and bodybuilding and strength and power output and performance, but also mental health, processing, and cognitive support. So I'm a believer in creatine, and I believe that everyone should be consuming it that can be consuming it. All right, next question. What does an average 24 hours look like in my day? Some of the sub-questions were, how many hours do I work each week now compared to the early days of VPN?

• 58:00Nick Bare?

  So, right now, I'll go through what a typical 24 hours in my day looks like right now. But to give some broad strokes, now I get to the office most days at 9:00 a.m. I leave by 4:00 p.m., and this is Monday through Friday. In the early days, 2017, when I got out of the Army, until 2021, it was just you work on whatever, whenever. It could start at 5:00 a.m. and go to midnight, Monday through Sunday, seven days a week. When you're building a business, in this case, you know, right when I transitioned out of the military, those first four years, it was just all-in, every day, all-day.

• 58:47Nick Bare?

  Everything. It's just what was required to get the business off the ground. And then slowly as the business started to scale and grow, we hired more people, I could delegate more duties and responsibilities. I got married, had kids. You know, my priorities shifted. That changed. Forced me to change my routine and schedule to be more consistent.

• 59:13Nick Bare?

  And now I pretty much work, you know, nine to four, Monday through Friday. There's obviously the exception where there's days where we start earlier, there's days where we go later, but I'd say majority of the time, pretty consistently, Monday through Friday, nine AM to four PM. On the weekends,

• 59:33Nick Bare?

  I'm not working in most cases, I'm with my family.

• 59:37Nick Bare?

  A sub-question was also, how much time do I spend with my family, daily or weekly? So Monday through Friday, I'm with my family after I get back from my morning run as, as everyone else is waking up from seven AM to eight thirty AM when I leave for the office, so an hour and a half in the morning. And then when I get home from work in the evening, four thirty PM to bedtime. And the weekend,

• 1:00:03Nick Bare?

  all day. All day, I'm with the family. Trying to spend as much time with my family as possible at this phase of my life. But still accomplish a lot of goals and, and build a business that I'm really proud of and lead a team and organization. So twenty-four hours in a day, what's it look like? Here we go. Four thirty AM. Wake up. Drink my G1M Sport. Eat my Go Bar. Give Nico, our one-year-old, a bottle. And I put him back to bed and he sleeps for a few more hours. Then by five thirty AM, I'm running. I run anywhere from eight to ten miles in the morning. Come back.

• 1:00:46Nick Bare?

  I have breakfast by six forty-five AM.

• 1:00:50Nick Bare?

  At seven fifteen AM, the kids start to wake up and Steph goes into our garage and she works out.

• 1:00:58Nick Bare?

  So I'm with the kids then 8:30 AM I leave for work from 9 AM to 4 PM I'm at work meetings, calls, podcasts, filming workouts, creating content, brainstorming with the team, planning, collaborating. It's pretty much non-stop from 9 AM to 4 PM, Monday through Friday. Getting as much done as possible, being extremely efficient and effective with our time. 4:30 PM, get home, hang out with the family. 5:30 PM, dinner with the family. From 6 PM to 7 PM, we have our nighttime activities. So this is, you know, we'll go on a golf cart

• 1:01:37Nick Bare?

  ride with the kids, we'll swim, we'll go on a walk, go to the playground. At 7 PM, we start our bedtime routine with the kids and clean up after dinner. And this is about a 90-minute routine from 7 PM to 8:30 PM. 8:30 PM to 9 PM, prepare for the next day. This is laying out clothes, packing bags, prepping meals. And then 9 PM, Steph and I start our bedtime routine and we try to be in bed by 9:30 or 10 PM. And this is a pretty accurate and consistent schedule for most days, Monday through Friday.

• 1:02:18Nick Bare?

  We're pretty dialed in right now with our routine and our schedule within minutes of what I just outlined. All right, here we go. Next question. What happened to my pickled beets obsession and era? To be honest, I just got over them, but they may make a return. When we moved to Nashville, and we were in Nashville for a few months,

• 1:02:48Nick Bare?

  we went to this farmer's market. It was every Tuesday in Sevier Park, which was walkable from the house we were living in. We were staying in the 12th South Green Hills area.

• 1:03:01Nick Bare?

  And I came across this farmer's market, loved this farmer's market. It was incredible, incredible, every Tuesday night.

• 1:03:12Nick Bare?

  And I came across this farmer who was selling pickled beets and it was one of those things I just picked up in passing and decided to try.

• 1:03:21Nick Bare?

  And I fell in love. I fell in love and I was obsessed. I was eating a jar of pickled beets, a whole jar, every other day.

• 1:03:32Nick Bare?

  And that was like a September of 2023.

• 1:03:37Nick Bare?

  For the next

• 1:03:39Nick Bare?

  18 months after that.

• 1:03:44Nick Bare?

  About 18 months, maybe hundreds of jars of pickled beets consumed. No lie. I consumed hundreds of jars. When I was buying them, I, I started buying them 10, 15, 20 jars at a time.

• 1:04:02Nick Bare?

  I was consuming so many pickled beets that they didn't have enough at the farmer's market. I had to drive to their farm and pick up cases of pickled beets.

• 1:04:11Nick Bare?

  So with all that being said, I think I just did, overdid it. And I got burnt out from my pickled beet era, which lasted, like I said, about 18 months. I was adding them to everything. I'd go into the fridge before going to sleep and I'd eat a bunch of pickled beets. But they may make a return. Now that I'm talking about pickled beets right now, it sounds really good.

• 1:04:33Nick Bare?

  I mean, I just got, I got burnt out from like the sweetness and the punchiness of the pickled aspect of the beet just became too much for me.

• 1:04:44Nick Bare?

  But as we move into the fall season, you know, right now, we're still in summer. Maybe in the fall season, it'll, it'll come back to me. Maybe it's a seasonal thing for me. Another question is what happened to daily sludge bowl? So I used to make this sludge bowl every single day years ago. And I still, I still make it, but there's variations to it. So the way that I used to make the sludge bowl is I would take a scoop of whey protein and a scoop of our plant-based vegan protein. I put it in a bowl with a little bit of of almond milk or water. And I'd mix it up in like a thicker paste. And then I would add a banana, peanut butter, cacao nibs, and coconut flakes. And it was, and honey.

• 1:05:30Nick Bare?

  I mean, I could actually, I could go for one of those sludge bowls right now. It was so good, so good. I mean, I should make one. I should make one tonight. That was, those, those were incredible. I'm gonna order, I'm gonna Instacart the ingredients right after this podcast. I'm gonna make one tonight.

• 1:05:50Nick Bare?

  The reason I stopped consuming the sludge bowl is because over the last couple of years, I started reducing my dietary fat intake daily, just to get a little bit leaner. And I increased my carbohydrate intake. So like that sludge bowl with the peanut butter, the coconut flakes, cacao nibs, it was actually really high in fat, or it could be really high in fat, depending on how much peanut butter, cacao nib, coconut flake you added to it. And that's the main reason I stopped making the sludge bowl is because it was so calorically dense and especially fat dense. And now I try to monitor my dietary fat closer

• 1:06:32Nick Bare?

  to like 120 grams a day, but carbs are much higher. I mean, especially in an Ironman prep right now. We just filmed the full day of eating video last week around Ironman prep, and I consumed 675 grams of carbs on that one training day.

• 1:06:50Nick Bare?

  But the sludge bowl was delicious. Now I have like a variation of my sludge bowl where I do overnight oats. I have this every day. So I'll do about 60 grams of oats, tablespoon of honey, whey protein, sometimes some vegan plant protein in there too. I'll add some almond milk or water, mix it up, put in the fridge overnight so it solidifies. And then the next morning, I'll add a sliced banana on top. So it's higher carb, lower fat, moderate protein. And that's now like my overnight oat modified sludge bowl from years ago.

• 1:07:29Nick Bare?

  But the sludge bowl, it's like, I have a sweet tooth myself. And the sludge bowl really just, just nailed that, that sweet tooth craving every single day. It was delicious. How do you know how much food to be consuming during a training block? This is a great question.

• 1:07:54Nick Bare?

  And because I've been doing this for so many years, it is now very intuitive.

• 1:08:01Nick Bare?

  And it's just part of me. It is very natural for me to just fluidly move through and do on a daily basis. But the first thing I want to address is that there's a difference between eating for performance and eating for aesthetics. And I have found that with a lot of people who come from a strength, bodybuilding, aesthetic focused training background, and then transitioning or evolving into more performance focused, being, you know, high rocks, or marathons, or ultras, or triathlons.

• 1:08:44Nick Bare?

  The mindset around food sometimes is a hard habit and mindset to evolve and break. Meaning that the way you used to think about food was all about what influenced body composition. How to either bulk up and put on weight and get stronger, or cut down and get leaner. So calories are not energy necessarily for performance, but they are a predictor of body composition and weight and body fat.

• 1:09:22Nick Bare?

  And as I have evolved from an aesthetic focused training background in the past to now performance focused, it took me some time to relearn how to utilize nutrition for performance as opposed to aesthetics. So there's a difference between eating to perform and fuel as opposed to facilitate a certain look or body composition.

• 1:09:47Nick Bare?

  I like to use tools like right now in this prep, for example, like my Garmin watch to estimate, and I want to put a hard emphasis on estimate my caloric expenditure.

• 1:10:01Nick Bare?

  Because this will give me a data point or a reference to know how much energy I'm expending, to know how much I need to refuel and replenish to maintain my performance and my recovery. So every day, my Garmin watch will tell me

• 1:10:19Nick Bare?

  roughly how many calories I burn around my workouts, around my training, just daily energy expenditure with movement and steps and all the things. Like last week I had a big training day and my watch said that I burned 5,000 calories in that day, which was probably accurate based off of my steps and my running and cycling and swimming for that specific day.

• 1:10:45Nick Bare?

  I don't use that as an exact to say, oh, I burned 5,000 calories. I need to go eat an additional 5,000 calories. No, I just use that as a reference and a tool to recognize, okay, I expended a lot of energy today. I need to replenish a lot of energy today, which tells me I need to eat a lot today to make sure that I'm topping off muscle glycogen to recover from those training sessions, but more importantly, to prime my body for the next couple of days of training sessions. I'm tracking my nutrition right now within MyFitnessPal. So I think that is, you know, when you go into a big training block, tracking your nutrition can be extremely beneficial to make sure you're eating enough.

• 1:11:31Nick Bare?

  Not necessarily to

• 1:11:34Nick Bare?

  to limit how much you're consuming, but to make sure that you're eating enough. So tracking nutrition, monitoring weight, so weighing it on a scale. You don't want to lose weight too quickly. If you're losing weight too quickly, add in more calories.

• 1:11:50Nick Bare?

  But for me, it's all around this mindset shift of we're not trying to necessarily lose weight and make the body work harder by being under fueled. It is how do we use food and fuel to our advantage to train as hard and as optimized as possible and recover well. And I would almost rather overeat than undereat, especially with with an athlete that I could be coaching. I would rather start them at way too many calories and have to pull back than put them in a deficit and put them in a hole and hurt their performance and recovery and then have

• 1:12:31Nick Bare?

  to increase that over time. So it's a lot of just test, apply and learn. Have these metric and data points that you're referencing. Now, I see I'm doing this much work. I'm expending this much energy. I need to replenish this much energy. I'm tracking my nutrition. I'm watching the scale. There's not a perfect science to it. There is, but it it's hard to track very accurately exactly what you are expending and then trying to match that with what you need to consume. So that's the way that I like to approach it.

• 1:13:12Nick Bare?

  It is this delicate dance of just making sure you're fueled for the workouts, especially around the workouts. Because the last thing you want is to be under fueled, to underperform and then under recover. How to stay motivated while simultaneously not comparing your results to others. There's this quote that I love, and I don't know who to credit it to, but it's extremely popular. And it says, "That comparison is the thief of joy." And that is so true.

• 1:13:51Nick Bare?

  There is this book that I read years ago, and I've read it multiple times. It's called "The Courage to Be Disliked." I think it's an incredible book. And it talks about the difference between feelings of being inferior versus an inferiority complex. And an inferiority complex is when you feel lesser than, weaker, smaller, compared to someone else. Someone else's accomplishments or success and achievement makes you feel smaller and weaker and less important. And an inferiority complex can be extremely dangerous. We should avoid that.

• 1:14:36Nick Bare?

  Feelings of being inferior are beneficial and positive. Inferior is a self-produced feeling based off of your previous self and knowing what your full potential could be. So when I go into this Ironman prep, for example, I don't have an inferiority complex where I'm comparing my times, my splits, and my work, and my performance, and my results to all these other people. But I am comparing from week to week, my performance and my results, because I want to get better. I want to improve. I want to consistently improve and get better over my lifetime to reach what I believe could be my full potential.

• 1:15:20Nick Bare?

  We all have that responsibility and obligation. And that is being inferior to your previous self. So there's a difference between being inferior and having an inferiority complex. Some things that I've realized and implemented over the years is the belief and understanding that there is room for everyone to win and succeed. And that someone else's success does not take away from my or your success. That was a big mindset shift for me to learn and truly accept. And then to realize that we all have different goals, missions, and purposes. And

• 1:16:05Nick Bare?

  We aren't working towards the same goals, mission, or purpose, which makes it impossible to compare where we are at to where someone else is at.

• 1:16:17Nick Bare?

  And the last thing I'll leave you with in terms of how do you stay motivated while simultaneously not comparing your results to others? Because when you compare your results to others, or anything you've done to others, it can be extremely negative and discouraging and disheartening.

• 1:16:38Nick Bare?

  What I've learned to do over years,

• 1:16:44Nick Bare?

  I have the Bible app, and I use the Bible app and the search feature on the Bible app similar to the way I use Google.

• 1:16:53Nick Bare?

  I think it's important to read your Bible, but you can use it as a resource and a reference. Any question I ever have, any struggle I'm ever experiencing, I will just go search the topic, or the question, or a few words within the Bible app, and it'll give me scripture and stories that are directly applicable to what I'm struggling with. The Bible has all the answers of life. That's the beautiful part of it. So in preparation for answering this question, I just went to the Bible app and I searched comparison. And I got a few lines of scripture, but one to share from 2 Corinthians says,

• 1:17:34Nick Bare?

  "We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves.

• 1:17:42Nick Bare?

  When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise."

• 1:17:50Nick Bare?

  The Bible tells us not to compare ourselves to others, and our accomplishments to others' accomplishments, and our success or our progress and our process to others. But to be focused on what we're working towards and why.

• 1:18:09Nick Bare?

  And stay on that path. Stay within that process. Comparison is the thief of joy. What does the future of endurance races at Bear Ranch look like?

• 1:18:24Nick Bare?

  Well, I'm glad you asked. Obviously, the Go One More Ultra in 2025 that we hosted a few weeks ago on Bear Ranch was a big success. And we're obviously going to run it back next year and the year after that and the year after that and the year after that. And the Go One More Ultra in 2026 will be middle of April next year. So we moved it up a little bit. This past year it was late May. We're going to move up to middle April. So it'll be a little cooler in terms of weather conditions. We'll be announcing the lottery for the Go One More Ultra in 2026 after the release of the film premiere.

• 1:19:09Nick Bare?

  The film is premiering September 5th, 2025. Shortly after that, we'll announce the lottery for next year's race. We're going all in on the Go One More Ultra. I see the Go One More Ultra for BPN being a high priority, maybe the highest priority event or activation. It's going to help scale and grow this brand for the foreseeable future. It is something that

• 1:19:40Nick Bare?

  we can own.

• 1:19:43Nick Bare?

  We have built. We have the permission to to play in. Now, we saw that after we launched the Go One More Ultra, there were a bunch of other brands who jumped at the opportunity to launch a race similar in nature or or somewhat similar. You know, we by no means created

• 1:20:09Nick Bare?

  the last man standing style race. We did not create it. We will never take any credit for that.

• 1:20:17Nick Bare?

  But the race that we hosted at Bear Ranch.

• 1:20:22Nick Bare?

  It was so closely aligned with our mission and what our brand is about, what we believe in. It was very authentic and organic, and I believe that is one of the reasons that it really reached the audience that it did within those couple of days that it lasted. And then watching a bunch of other brands hop on that opportunity to

• 1:20:45Nick Bare?

  gain some momentum or exposure based off of what happened in our race. It doesn't always work that way. You know, we believe that we positioned the brand for years

• 1:21:00Nick Bare?

  to get to a point where we could host a race like we did and for it to reach the amount of people that it did. I believe that the Go One More Ultra in 2026 and for years to come is going to be absolutely pivotal for our brand, exposure, awareness, reaching new people and new audiences.

• 1:21:22Nick Bare?

  I believe in it. It needs to be massive for us. So we're going all in. All in. 2026 will be bigger, it'll be better. We learned a lot from the race in 2025.

• 1:21:36Nick Bare?

  And we're actually going to be releasing and launching some additional races on the ranch throughout the year, and we have plans to expand those races to different cities, different states in the upcoming years. So an example of that, we are re-hosting our 50 Mile Overnight Ultra in early November on the ranch. That lottery will open up early August. And for the top couple of finishers of that race, they will get a golden ticket into the Go One More Ultra 2026. Both these races will be lottery-style races, so you put your name in the lottery and

• 1:22:17Nick Bare?

  a certain number of runners will be selected for each race. And we see an opportunity in the future that we have these golden ticket race opportunities across the country, like I said, in different cities and states. That create opportunities for golden tickets to come race and throw down at the Go One More Ultra in the spring at Bear Ranch. So we're just getting started with endurance races at the ranch and 2025 was a great first big race to launch there that we're going to learn from and do even bigger and better in the future. What are our plans for the G1M Sport RTD?

• 1:23:00Nick Bare?

  So for the last six plus months, we have been teasing the RTD, which RTD stands for ready to drink beverage. So imagine like a bottle. We've been working with a manufacturer of these last couple of months to take our best selling products being G1M Sport and G1M Sport Plus. G1M Sport Plus is the caffeinated version with no tropics of G1M Sport. Those are our top two selling products. And we were working with a manufacturer to create that into an RTD, a beverage. And we have those products now, both in a lemon lime flavor.

• 1:23:41Nick Bare?

  We will be launching G1M Sport and G1M Sport Plus RTD beverages on Amazon exclusively in late August. So there was a lot of due diligence and exploration and learnings as we, you know, the thought of this new product and this delivery system. G1M Sport, G1M Sport Plus has been a powder. We're now moving it to a beverage. We will still sell the powder, but in addition to the beverage. And we explored options of taking that distribution to retail, to wholesale, which the plan is

• 1:24:23Nick Bare?

  to eventually introduce and launch. But initially for us, what makes the most sense is launching those RTDs on Amazon. Fulfillment is actually the most efficient on Amazon for us. Warehouse and holding is the most efficient.

• 1:24:42Nick Bare?

  Amazon does a great job with distribution and then speaking to some other beverage companies, they have their best sales and performance for their beverage cases, you know, and say 12 packs of their beverage on Amazon. And Amazon outperforms for them compared to their website or even retail partners and convenience. So we will be testing and launching our RTDs, GUM Sport, GUM Sport Plus on Amazon, launching in late August.

• 1:25:18Nick Bare?

  And then we'll be monitoring that success and progress over the next couple of months. And the goal is that in the future, down the road, we then get into major distribution with retailers, in-store retailers to offer and sell these beverages, these RTDs. This launch has to be done very intentionally, very strategically. It has huge upside and huge potential, but also massive risk. And we want to mitigate and reduce risk as much as possible and capitalize on our upside and potential and taking this launch very slow, very deliberate, very strategic. And that's why we've chosen Amazon as our initial

• 1:26:03Nick Bare?

  go-to-market strategy and distribution model. So you'll be able to get GUM Sport and GUM Sport Plus RTDs on Amazon late August. And the last question and answer I have for you guys, what does winning look like and mean to you?

• 1:26:25Nick Bare?

  And I'll take it back to the first question that I answered, how faith has influenced and been a part of my journey and story and success.

• 1:26:37Nick Bare?

  And my, my perception and the way that I define winning has also evolved over the years. If you would have asked me what winning was and looked like

• 1:26:49Nick Bare?

  2012, 2017, 2018, even 2019,

• 1:26:56Nick Bare?

  It probably would have been metric driven. It would have been financial driven, data driven. I used to be fearful of becoming irrelevant. And that actually directed and influenced some of my decisions. You know, irrelevant in terms of, you know, you, you, you document your life, you, you build this platform. You cultivate this community and this audience and at some point you start comparing yourself to others and, and their views and their metrics and their subscribers and their success. It can be very destructive and dangerous.

• 1:27:39Nick Bare?

  And it never felt good operating from that. That lens or with those targets. And I no longer think or operate that way. I don't have a fear of becoming irrelevant. I don't determine my success by finance or views or, or downloads or subscribers or followers or any of those things. I think they are, they are and can be important metrics to determine if, if what you're doing in terms of your job and the content you are

• 1:28:24Nick Bare?

  creating, the message you, you are sharing is connecting with people. But it's not the end all be all. It's not everything. So how do I define success and what does winning look like now? I have a few questions that I wrote down that I just ask myself frequently to, to judge this. Am I leading my family? How am I leading my family? What I'm leading them towards? Am I working towards goals that are aligned by a vision, my vision? Am I serving God? Am I positioning myself, my words, my actions as a role model?

• 1:29:08Nick Bare?

  Am I doing good work in this world? Am I helping people?

• 1:29:15Nick Bare?

  I ask myself those questions to determine if I am winning, if I am succeeding, if I am accomplishing what I say and said I wanted to do. So winning now looks different than it did years ago. And that's growing up, that's maturing, that's evolving, that's learning. So those are some of the questions that I wanted to answer in this question and answer this Q and A. Thank you guys for submitting them. Thanks for all the great insight and curiosity. I appreciate you guys and we'll see you in the next episode.